The Piccolo, the Pocketgrouse, and Peapod Pritchard

My dear friend Paige Pritchard sent this lovely email to me and another friend. It's about birds and music—perfectly apt for a blog called Bard Owls, no? -TC

Hello fellow lovers of nature and sound!

I bookmarked this article ("The Piccolo and the Pocketgrouse," by Eric Wagner in Orion) to read a while back, and finally got around to it when I woke up earlier than expected this morning. Given that I'm not fully awake, lazily reading about the intersection of bird songs and music theory was a perfect way to ease my way into consciousness for the day. While reading the article I took the time to research some of the musical pieces and listen to them as Wagner describes it. Tina, I immediately thought of you with all of the ornithology in the piece, I'm sure you've heard of some of the birds the writer featured in the musical pieces! 

 

Petites Esquisses D'oiseaux (translates into, "Small Bird Sketches," I think? "Small Sketches of Birds?") by Olivier Messiaen:  

 

And Brooke, I know we've talked about classical music before. This piece raises the question that comes along with any great aural analysis - What is music? The music of birds, whales, etc. is a collection of sounds that, although beautiful, are arranged haphazardly. It's a stark contrast to the extended melodies of Western music and what we would consider as intelligent composition. Which, then, is the natural form of music? That which occurs organically in animals, or the music we create because it abides by a set of rules and is pleasing to the ear? Wagner addresses this in the second section. 

Either way, the phrase "aural ecology" is now a part of my vocabulary now. What a beautiful term. 

(Emily Doolittle's website, more links are in blue)

Night Blackbird Song

Music for Magpies: Pied Butcherbird [editor's note: Yes! Shrikes are incredible birds!]

 

Check it out when you have a few spare minutes, it's a fun concept to sink your teeth into :) 

 

Also, check Paige out if you have a few spare minutes. She's a most joyful and curious writer, and a great travel partner to boot. Her tweets are music to *my* ears. 

River roads at night

A playlist:

1. Justin Townes Earle - Lone Pine Hill

2. Matt Bauer - Heap of Little Horses



3. William Elliott Whitmore - One Man's Shame



4. Tom Waits - Lucinda

5. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis vs Last Poets & Dead Prez - Panther Train



Just long enough to get lost and unsettled.

Modeling Our Demise

It is not often on Bard Owls that I post short fiction but today it seemed appropriate. Largely because it is also not every day that I find an artist as good as James Vincent McMorrow. The first song of his I heard was his new single Cavalier. I recommend you give it a listen and point your eyeballs at my short fiction ode to The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.

Modeling Our Demise 

The model ran through the night, a peculiarity worth noting. The computing power long ago made short work of explaining the earth’s and indeed many other planets’ biogeochemical cycles. The even greater step of predicting the outcome of these systems for the next several billion years had originally taken most of the computational power on earth to calculate. Now, even that once monumental task could be completed with any number of iterations and down to an infinitesimally small degree of error in no more than a margin of a second.

The model that currently occupied the network of earth’s supercomputers had been built upon these past two accomplishments. All of the data that was ever created on earth was fed into the model. All existing predictions made by the previous models, all the butterflies flapping of wings and all the hurricanes in the pacific that ever were and all that ever would be until the earth’s destruction by the sun had all been neatly factored into the model’s consideration. When the last number of ephemeral rainbows, drops of ocean water on the side of every last fjord and the forces of every last subatomic particle in existence had been rounded to last significant digit, the universe blinked. For with nothing left to be found, understood, or created the process of the universe was complete and with that it promptly started to condense, collapse and close up shop, waiting to once again bang into existence and be learned anew. 

Between One Red Lantern and Another

Oh hey, cold weather. Are you getting ready to freeze my hands solid for a full two seasons and turn me into a whimpering baby? Yeah? That's cool. I'll live. Batten down the hatches. I've taken to drying my hair for warmth. And listening to Bon Iver. Who needs circulation or decibels above a whisper? Not this girl.

Lantern in Missouri, looking out toward my friends.

But here's something that warms my heart (aww) (you'll never take this away from me, Weather!): Nick married another fantastic forester earlier this month. Double forest power! Ask him about the proposal sometime.

For the ceremony, Nick asked me to read this beautiful passage from Walt Whitman:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

The two lil' lovebirches needed a proper gift, and I fortunately have some truly antique and personal items befitting our friendship. These past few months, I've helped clear out the house where my great-grandparents and I lived since 2000. I'd never seen this pair of old red lamps in Grampa's shed until last month, but I instantly knew where they belonged. After some work, of course.

First, I had to clean off the outside cobwebs and grime. Then accept the inner webs as "character." And finally, give a symbolic gift. Telling Nick and Megan to "keep a light on for each other," and "I'll keep a light on for you," I gave them a lantern and hung the other on my porch.

It's funny, that as I searched for a quote to write on their card, I came upon Aldo Leopold's essay, "Red Lanterns," from the October chapter. It could only have fit better if Mr. Leopold were writing about actual lanterns and not the red leaves of a blackberry bush. Or if the Mustoe wedding featured blackberries instead of lavender and wheat. But I digress. Their wedding was perfect (right down to the Midwest bouquets, homemade dress, and offbeat readings), and this coincidence was just perfect enough.

Nick and Megan's lantern in Arkansas.

Stanley Donwood and Spirits in the Forest

 I received an email last week from one Stanley Donwood. It was a newsletter he crafts every once in a while, and I always try to read them for A) artistic perspective and B) mention of Radiohead. Donwood has created all of the band's original artwork for nearly twenty years, which boggles my mind. Concert posters? Album sleeves? They grace several walls. I guess this makes me an art collector.

Anyway, this piece of mail caught my eye, for it not only touched on A and B, but stirred up item C, which lingers just as constantly in my mind: nature, forests, trees. He talks about an exhibit of paintings from his Holloway project, part of which emerged in Radiohead's The King of Limbs art. It's got me thinking about spirits we feel in the forest, if they should be feared, or revered, or both. Let's go with both.

The Next Step in Citizen Cartography

With Tina's recent post covering a different look at maps than we usually see and the Atlantic's article on OpenStreetMap and non-traditional cartographers entitled "What Happens When Everyone Makes Maps?" my mind has been filled with all the possibilities that exist today for citizen cartographers.

Disclaimer, I am a huge fan of OpenStreetMap. For those who are not familiar, the five second version is that OpenStreetMap does to mapping what Wikipedia did to encyclopedias. Imagine Google Maps where each bike path and fence line that someone has taken to the time to map makes its way to your eyeballs and you would have a pretty good idea of what it looks like for some areas of the world. Results may very. Again, this is a similarity it has with Wikipedia.

The new National Atlas Streamer: tool for watershed-based reporting, or personal cartographer?

With help from the brand-new National Atlas Streamer Map and Pixlr, I've been having fun with watershed maps all morning. I've been delighted by what I could learn and create. Like this information on the Gasconade River, my home watershed*:

Trace Details

Trace Direction: Upstream
Trace Origin Stream Name: Gasconade River
Trace Origin (latitude, longitude): 38.676, -91.556
Trace Origin Elevation (feet): 614

Water Features

Total Length of Traced Streams (miles): 800
Outlet Waterbody: Gulf of Mexico
USGS Stream Gages (count): 12
Stream Names (count): 18

Political Features

U.S. States (count): 1
U.S. Counties (count): 12
Total County Population (2010): 320,595
Cities (count): 31

For people without a fancy geography system, this is a phenomenal way to report statistics and details at the watershed level. I have hoped for some easy way to make this kind of calculation for the kinds of articles I want to write. So journalists, take heed! There's more to a border than a line on the map. (Actually, there are many, many lines.) 

And that's just the summary report. In detail, you can see the USGS stream gauge locations, the stream names of all the creeks that feed into your selected river, and the counties and cities inside that watershed. Oh, what the heck, here's the rest of the information:

Fire-bison, the Great Spirit and Other Missouri Prairies Features

I'm trying to decide what's cooler. Fire-managed prairies, or bison-managed prairies. Whoa. What if there were fire-bison? Debate over.

Fire Bison. My new favorite animal.

Take a look at this drone-generated video of fire at Tucker Prairie, a research site managed by the University of Missouri. In General Ecology at MU, I learned about secession from Dr. Faaborg and my awesome TA Alicia Burke, and observed (one square meter by one square meter, a hundred times, for six hours), how burns change plant composition over one, two, five and 30 years. It's cooler than it sounds, guys.

So in honor of all those prairies about to rise like so many Phoenix, here's a look at more tallgrass havens bumpin' around the Show-Me State. Descriptions come from Public Prairies of Missouri, a Missouri Department of Conservation book published in 1999 (i.e., don't blame me if a species is extinct or the conservation area added more land or something...though I did try to check it for you). The book features 72 sites, but before you get excited, remember:

"More than 13 million acres of tallgrass prairie once covered more than one-third of Missouri’s landscape. Today, less than 65,000 acres remain." - Missouri State Parks

Womp womp.

But seriously, if those numbers disturb you (and you'd like to make sure kids aren't saying Little House on the What? when you tell them about Laura Ingalls Wilder), visit the Missouri Prairie Foundation website for opportunities to help. Every prairie is important, from smallest to largest, from cutesy names to serious bird-watching. So saddle up that prairie schooner and venture out to these sites!

Swimming in the fish bowl

I went for an evening walk around the neighborhood with my dog yesterday evening. The sun was beginning to set and the clouds were lit up a bright red as we meandered down the side streets. The sky kept my attention as the dog went through her usual routine of peeing and sniffing at will. It was one of those evenings where the temperature was a near perfect 75 degrees and the air was still.

I could not help but think of myself as a fish in a fishbowl. Here I was at around 150 million kilometers from the sun experiencing conditions that fit my species conditions for life nearly perfectly. All the life around me seemed to agree as the redbuds bloomed gloriously and the dog sauntered on down the road at the end of the leash.

I looked for the moon as we continued in silence. I thought of all the random events that played a role in me being able to experience that moment. I started with the accumulation of heavy elements from stars and supernovaes thousands of lightyears away and possibly millennia ago that had provided the chemical building blocks of life. I thought of our star in particular in providing the energy for every living thing I saw before me by turning hydrogen into helium at such a great distance away. I took a breath and turned to the constituents of the air I was breathing, primarily nitrogen and oxygen.

I remember thinking awhile back how limiting it must be to be a fish. For almost all fish, being outside of the water for any length of time is sure to result in death. What glorious wonders they were missing by being limited to the water bodies. I quickly realized that the same was true for us about the wonders of the depths of the oceans and lakes around the world. It occured to me that maybe we were the ones choosing the more limiting option.

As the dog turned the corner and guided us home, this thoughts continued to wonder. I continued where I had left off and realized that not only was being a human limiting in a sense of access to the depths of the ocean but also to every other atmosphere in our solar system. Even on land our dependence on earth's atmosphere makes as just as much fish in the fishbowl in the planetary scale. I suppose the round dome of the space suit is all the more fitting.

With that, I leave you with one of my favorite presentations on the topic of space, life and science. A man who became immortalized in a quote about making an apple pie, Carl Sagan.



Also, this post would be incomplete without a playlist worth listening to when you look up at the stars at night:

Too Much and Too Long

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP -- if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

- Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968